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Daredevil Season 1 is considered by many, including myself, to be one of the finest examples of comic book TV shows, and indeed TV shows in general. Daredevil Season 2 was half that good, but the second half failed to keep up the momentum. Daredevil Season 3? Well, it may be in the running to be the best of them all, or at the very least a return to form that can live up to the original series…

Synopsis:

After the destruction at Midland Circle, Matt Murdock is washed up at the docks and saved by a cab driver who takes him to Father Lantom and Sister Maggie, the place where he grew up. Injured and with his senses out of order, Matt begins to think whether continuing to live at all is a good idea, let alone trying to go back to being Matt Murdock…

Matt Murdock / Daredevil (Charlie Cox) – Matt though he died alongside Elektra when Midland Circle collapsed, but instead he eventually woke up in the church he grew up in. Deaf in one ear and lacking a sense of smell, Matt knows he can’t be Daredevil any more, and that his time as Matt Murdock only brought misery to his friends… So few options are left for him…

Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) – Karen has never given up on the possibility of Matt still being alive, after all his body was never found in the building wreckage. Still, while she waits and hopes, she also still works as a reporter…

Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) – Foggy has begun to accept Matt’s apparent death, though he feels responsible for it due to being the one to give him his old Daredevil suit. Foggy continues to be a lawyer, but he feels something is wrong with his life…

Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) – Wilson Fisk was once at the top of the chain of New York crime, the Kingpin, as it were… Sorry. Anyway, he has spent a good while in prison without telling the FBI anything, but now he’s worried his old love Vanessa might be in danger…

Benjamin Poindexter (Wilson Bethel) – Dex is a frankly amazing shot, and as a SWAT sniper has personally killed many people. Psychologists worry what effect that could have on his mind if he doesn’t have a way to deal with it…

Rahul Nadeem (Jay Ali) – Ray is a respected agent in the FBI who is waiting for his next big promotion, but sadly his finances took a hit when he had to help with an in-law’s cancer battle, and a bad credit rating means no promotion…

Plus more!

The Good:

Matt realises he forgot he was overdue a long and elaborate fight sequence.

I’m not going to sit here and recap every little thing, that’s what the previous three Episode breakdown reviews were for, but as an overview the series did a few major things:

Matt Murdock fell to rock bottom, began to give up on his ideals, and even his life at one point. He found out his mother is a Nun and no one told him she was actually with him through his life, and Wilson Fisk gets out of prison and does his very best to ruin what little life the former Daredevil has in him. In other words, he has a rough time of it…

Part of Fisk’s plan ends up involving manipulating FBI Agent Poindexter, using the man’s often under-control psychopathic tendencies to turn him into a straight up serial killer, donning the old Daredevil costume and slaughtering people to ruin Murdock’s other side in the public’s eye and to use it as a reason as to why Fisk was “framed” and therefore allowed to leave prison permanently. Dex is a brilliant character, believably psycho and with every bit of the comic Bullseye’s accuracy abilities. Some of the fights between the former Daredevil and possibly-future-Bullseye are great, a real highlight.

In the end Dex finds out he was betrayed by the would-be Kingpin and goes to attack him on his wedding day, only to be stopped by Matt. The three get into a great three-way battle that sees Dex crippled and Kingpin beaten and arrested, with Matt hanging on to his ideals by not killing the man. He reached rock bottom, but managed to come out of it a better man, classic comic book storytelling! Matt was great, Wilson Fisk was every bit the compelling and great villain he was in Season 1, and Dex is a brilliant character and worth the wait in terms of having an MCU Bullseye.

Other plot threads surround FBI agent Ray Nadeem. He can’t get promoted because he has dodgy finances, and then he becomes the man who makes Fisk talk and gets famous because of it… but this was all part of the Kingpin’s plan, right down to Nadeem’s sister-in-law not being able to afford cancer treatment without his help. Sadly Ray begins to figure things out, so much so that he is then framed for murder and brought onto Kingpin’s FBI roster, showing him just how deep his influence goes. Nadeem goes along with it for the sake of his family, then when Dex kills a priest, he realises he went too far and tries to testify… until it’s stopped by Fisk. Ray then gets himself killed by Dex to save his family, but not before filming a final confession which soon gets out to the wider world and lands Fisk back in prison. Revenge from beyond the grave! Seriously, spread over 13 episodes, it was a great story, and I was sorry to see him die.

Karen is under constant threat as well, and ends up with the old roving reporter shtick, even when her office is attacked and several staff are killed. She helps out, and hinders, and re-connects with Matt… it’s fine. Foggy too, is fine. He tries to get out from under Fisk by making himself public and running for D.A., but that just makes his really nice family a target instead. Matt, Karen and Foggy all come together in the end, after going through a lot of crap. It’s a nice ending…

Story aside, there were some great fight scenes as well, including the aforementioned showdowns between Matt and Dex and the final battle between the two and Kingpin, but undoubtably the big highlight of the series, fight-wise, was the prison escape fight scene that lasts nearly a third of Episode 4. It has Matt fight through escaped inmates, corrupt guards and a final desperate dash out of the smoke and gas-filled halls, arriving back in the Taxi he took to get there in the first place. Brutally realistic fighting, complete with long scenes of people slowly getting up, catching their breath before fighting again, it truly had me gripped the whole way.

The Bad:

He’s the bad, and he loves it!

A Karen Page flashback that lasted half of Episode 10 wasn’t very fun to watch, and not in a dramatic way… plus it didn’t really add much to anything. I appreciate trying to add layers onto a character to make them more well-rounded, but … nah, that didn’t work.

That’s it really, though! It was perfectly paced, keeping me interested the whole way through, and full of great action and drama…

Overall Thoughts:

Truly MCU’s best villain, let’s have him escape prison again and tackle Spider-Man!

Daredevil Season 3 may well be the best TV season in the MCU, if not it’s second only to the original Daredevil season. The trio of Matt Murdock, Wilson Fisk and Dex are all well served, acted brilliantly and form an extremely strong backbone to a season that still has other good things going for it as well. Highly, highly recommended!